"Stroop-like interference between structural and functional hand gestures within objects : Part II"

Abstract: This talk is actually the follow-up of my last presentation given at the Doc'in Nicod in March (22/3). New data and theoretical implications for the study of hand gestures facilitation by visual objects will be presented.
Man-made objects elicit two kinds of hand gestures: structural (associated with the shape-based properties of objects) and functional (associated with their typical usage) hand gestures. We adapted a Stroop-like paradigm to assess whether they are both automatically activated when viewing an object and if they compete with each other. Participants learned to associate either a “clench” or a “poke” movement with a color, and then executed them in response to the color of pictures of objects associated with both actions. Objects were displayed either entirely or only partially colored, congruently or incongruently relative to the relationship between the color and the object part. Results show that planning any hand movement on an object is slower when attention is drawn to its functional part, suggesting that elicitation of hand gestures may depend on the allocation of visual attention.